Notre musique (2004) - film review

Hell: images of war, some real, others cinematic recreations, some portraying the brutality and carnage, others glorifying this most universal of human pursuits.  Purgatory: a literary conference in Sarajevo, where filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard discusses the relationship between text and image.  He exchanges ideas with a Spanish writer, Juan Goytisolo, a Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich and Judith Lerner, a young Israeli journalist, amongst others.  Paradise: Olga, a young student girl who was killed during a hostage drama in Jerusalem, finds herself in a verdant paradise, which is guarded by US marines.  She is at peace.

Notre Musique, Jean-Luc Godard’s latest cinematic offering is a sobering yet somewhat opaque, almost surreal, meditation on human existence.  Adopting the three-part structure of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the film comprises a lengthy middle section – appropriately entitled Purgatory – in which writers and artists exchange thoughts ranging from the profound to the laughably pretentious, sandwiched between two short sections which show us a vision of Hell and Heaven.  As ever, Godard makes no attempt to rationalise his work on screen or even to draw the threads of his ideas into a coherent whole.  Instead, he invites us to pause and reflect on the state of the world and draw our own interpretation, to make our own conclusions.

Whilst it lacks the artistic, stylistic and narrative coherence of Godard’s previous great works, Notre musique is nonetheless a work that is strangely compelling.  It is not so much a film as a piece of abstract art or a special kind of lens that allows us to look at the world around us and see things in possibly a new light.  Can there be meaning in the apparent meaninglessness that is war, this endless obsession that human beings have for obliterating one another?  Palestine and Israel illustrate the duality which lies at the heart of human consciousness: the desire for peace achieved through interminable war.  One is light, the other darkness.  Without one, the other would not exist.  Without Hell, there could be no Heaven.

After a spectacular opening montage which conveys not just the sheer horror of war but also man’s sickening obsession with images of war, the film’s rambling middle section is mildly off-putting.   The spectator is bombarded with political and philosophical observations, and it’s hard to keep up and separate the wheat from the chaff.  The static, unimaginative photography doesn’t help, and after a while it really does feel like you are in purgatory, having to endure the endless empty rhetoric of a group of ineffectual, self-important free-thinkers.  Yet, although stylistically weak, even this part of the film holds our attention, provoking us to take stock and gather our thoughts.  The world is a mess, humanity is a mess, but the re-birth of a war-scarred Sarajevo offers a ray of hope for the future.  But can Godard be right in supposing that the Heaven we all crave is policed by American soldiers?  If it ends the grief, the hate and the carnage, wouldn’t it be worth it?  There’s more than a touch of irony in that final sequence set in the Garden of Eden…

© James Travers 2006

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